Special Appeal – Free Rafah Nached

Announced on French-language news site Lacan Quotidien this evening: Rafah Nached is free! After having been informed that she could be on the list of prisoners to be released imminently by the Syrian authorities, Rafah Nached’s husband arrived earlier today at the prison 80km from Damascus to the pleasant surprise of being able to greet her on her release. She was able to speak briefly to her children by telephone, one of whom has confirmed that she is still waiting on the Syrian authorities to fully ‘close her file’, before which time she cannot move entirely freely. However, she does not appear to require urgent medical treatment and will now rest.

The psychoanalytic community has come together to call on the Syrian government to release Lacanian psychoanalyst Rafah Nached.

The first Syrian woman to work as a psychoanalyst in Syria for 26 years, she was arrested by the Syrian authorities on 10th September at Damascus airport where she was en route to Paris. She is 66 years old and suffers from health problems.

Many influential names in the psychoanalytic community have lent their signatures to the petition for her release and a Committee of Support has been formed among various psychoanalytical organisations across the world.

Add your name to the petition, alongside Slavoj Zizek, Alain Badiou, Noam Chomsky and Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, by emailing rafah.navarin@gmail.com or submitting via the form here.

If you speak French or Arabic, this YouTube video contains a message from Rafah to the outside world. A more thorough update from Jacques-Alain Miller on the efforts by he and others to campaign for her release can be found (in French) here. For English-speakers, the College of Psychoanalysts in the UK has collated media reports providing background and links to other sites where you can lend your support here. This site, in English, also provides regularly updated news on the case.

UPDATE: EU PARLIAMENT RESOLUTION 27th OCTOBER

The EU Parliament has passed a Joint Resolution on the case of Rafah Nached in which it “Strongly condemns the arbitrary arrest and detention of Rafah Hashed by the Syrian authorities” and “Calls on the Syrian authorities immediately and unconditionally to release Ms Nashed on medical and humanitarian grounds and to guarantee her physical safety and return her to her family without further delay.” You can read the full text of the Resolution here.

In addition, on 23 September 2011 Catherine Ashton, the European Union’s High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Secutiry, issued her own statement on Rafah Nached’s situation, echoing the Joint Resolution.

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Today, the EU Parliament will raise the case of Rafa Nached the psychoanalyst imprisoned by the Syrian authorities since early September. Today’s debate in the European Parliament will be shown live (15:00-16:00 GMT+1) and can also be viewed tomorrow. http://www.europarl.europa.eu/sed/speeches.do

Rafa was detained at 1.30 am on September 10th of this 66 year old Syrian Lacanian analyst, at the Damascus international airport, while on her way to attend the birth of her first grandchild in Paris. She is currently held in Duma, a women’s prison near Damascus, apparently due to offering along with Jesuit Father Elias Rami, also an analyst, weekly sessions of psychological support for people, both Muslim and Christian, traumatized by the events.

As the first female psychoanalyst to practise in Syria Rafa Nached has been engaged over the past 26 years in clinical work and is founder of the Damascus School of Psychoanalysis. As analysts we have a profound understanding of trauma and a wish to alleviate the anxiety of others, but how many of us would have the courage to do so under the current conditions in Syria?

Members of COWAP are appalled at her detention As analytic colleagues and an international organisation specifically concerned with women and psychoanalysis, we express our admiration and grave concern for Rafa Nached’s well-being, hoping you will key in her name on the internet, and sign one of the many petitions demanding her speedy release, including: rafah.navarin@gmail.com.

Poor Antigone is simply doomed to an unhappy end, is she not? Whether acted out by three people on a stage, or acted upon in the world in which she was embodied as a fugyre for mental masturbation among ivory tower’s, Our Detta twists wildly and then shit got real crazy.

Pardon the unconscious practice, but Freud’s circle is just too damn tight to you. You okay? “Hell get here right away, you must be getting malaria from all of that unresolved tension jack-hamering through your body.

Down with Creon and all of his ilk. I have a problem with a single person on earth and not. If you have the credentials of angels, I have a nasty combination hook, jab. Would such an action place me between two deaths? Perhaps, yes. But I would chose my ultimate desire, goddamnit and don’t care if you napalm us. WE’ll be flying the liberated birds, however burned they may be.

Finally, hey, you mega rich brats who began this “company.” Then you get a fucking grenade land right in one of your vest pockets on the last day of fighting. At least I didn’t get syphilis on the occasional of my first encounter with a woman. The Horse of 1899 appreciated it, but the woman was just disgusted.

Hope that you will receive tis and be into work tonight.

Now if that is not a non-sequiter worthy of the true downfall of Irony, then I invite people to blow up any fucking thing they wish in his house. But, that’s if you don’t blow me apart first. Rusty has freaking had it. Save him from his pyshchotic induced attack.

I certainly hope that you enjoyed my contrabution to the toic at hand.I say “Live long, Fuck them.”

I really have no idea what I am in the midst of currently. Perhaps we’ll all be psychotic before the year picks up.

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LacanOnline.com is a site for exploring psychoanalysis through the work of Jacques Lacan

Jacques Lacan was a French psychoanalyst, 1901 - 1981.
Trained as a psychiatrist, he abandoned the profession in favour of psychoanalysis in the early thirties. After publishing his paper on the Mirror Stage in 1949, for which he is probably best known to the general public, in the early fifties Lacan embarked on a project he called the 'Return to Freud'.

Lacan began holding yearly seminars, starting in 1952, re-examining Freud's work. At the time, the theory and technique of psychoanalysis was facing a complete overhaul at the hands of post-Freudian psychoanalysts, many of whom had emigrated to the United States after the war. Lacan railed against their teaching of Freud, seeing it as an oversimplification of his work and a corruption of psychoanalytic technique reducing it to the status of life management. Through his seminars he offered another interpretation of Freud's work and psychoanalytic theory. Inventive, radical and adventurous, many still believe Lacan's to be a creative mis-reading of Freud.

However Lacan's seminars grew in popularity and as his teaching developed from a reading of Freud's text to an elaboration of his own concepts his teaching became more influential. Lacan continued to give yearly seminars until the year before his death in 1981. By that time, he had become a major intellectual figure in public life and had both created and disbanded his own school, separating his members both from the established psychoanalytic institutions and from each other.

Today, Lacanian theory is advanced by a number of disparate groupings of his followers and the technique of psychoanalysis he developed is practiced clinically by Lacanian analysts around the world.